Help! Sonar doesn't see my Garritan Steinway!

[JohnGrant]

Probably the depths of dumbness on my part, but Sonar 8.5 (64 bit) doesn't see (recognize as a plugin) the Garritan Steinway, although it recognizes a lot of other stuff that I'm not interested in... naturally ...

In the old days you'd right click on fx and the Garritan was there as an instrument option. Not now, it seems.

Any help would be greatly, greatly appreciated!

JG

[Larry G. Alexander]

Have you done the Tools/Cakewalk Plug-in Manager/Scan VST Plugins routine yet?

[JohnGrant]

Indeed, I have! And of course it picks up lots of plugins, but not the Garritan!

JG

[Larry G. Alexander]

Check to see if the Steinway .dll file is installed in the proper place.

[JohnGrant]

Thanks, Larry, I'll check that out.... but it sure looks like the more advanced these sequencers get, the less easy it is to find the relevant subdirectories and copy in the relevant plugins.

JG

[JohnGrant]

OK... Sonar recognizes Garritan as a soft synth. But latency is way up. There must be a more efficient way of doing this, so that you simply start whatever sequencer you want to use and whatever sample you want to use and they more or less understand each other from the get-go, with minimal loss in latency and power.

I suspect this is very old territory.... I'm checking out programs that do this (rewire?)..

JG

[Jeff Hurchalla]

Yeah it's a pain with the VSTi plugin format that the plugins' location is not standardized - you have to tell your sequencer where to look, or copy a particular plugin to the folder where it is already looking for plugins.
As for latency, that will be something you'll adjust in the Sonar settings. I can't remember what Sonar calls it, but it would be a menu item to set the configuration or preferences for your audio playback/devices - if you can find a place that talks about ASIO or WDM kernel streaming, that's the spot where you get to affect the latency in Sonar.

[Larry G. Alexander]

In Sonar, go to Options/Audio Options/Advanced.

Your can adjust the settings there including the latency.

Regards,

[JohnGrant]

Hey thanks, that's very useful information.... But all this makes me long for the days of gigasampler--evil days some say--still where the sample and the sequencer worked independently.... at least that was my happy experience....

So I guess the subtext is that if you can work all this out within the constraints of sonar and whatever sample you happen to be running, that approach will be the most power-effecient sort of by definition.

Ergo: don't introduce extraneous programs to link the two if you can manage without.

JG

[ab53]

I have sonar 8.5 and the Garritan 24 bit installed. I found that putting the Garritan samples on an intel SSD really helped the performance of the Steinway. I am using XP. Fortunately, the Intel SSD comes with a trim tool that works in XP. And since you are only loading the Steinway once onto the SSD, there are no further writes to the SSD and it has remained constant for me. (Steinway loads about twice as fast and it appears that the latency has improved as well.)

[JohnGrant]

I'm running the Garritan on an ssd. As a standalone it runs with very low (imperceptible) latency. Inside Sonar 8.5 it's a different story. I use the ultra track usb interface and find that "midi out" in track properties must be set to "garritan" to hear anything, which is a pain on top of setting up Garritan in the synth rack.

JG

[Haydn]

Remember that the synth rack is the place for all your VSTi instruments. Think of this as an outboard rack of gear. You MIDI out settings are just being directed to each of the instruments in your rack just as if you had different rack synths on different external MIDI outputs.

GigaStudio was a pain when it was external versus using VSTi's like the ARIA player. You had 2 different things to load - the sequence and then the multi in Giga. Sonar using VSTi's remembers the settings within the project for the VSTi's which means only one thing to load to get your project going. This comes in handy a couple years down the road when you may have lost Giga's multi or changed it accidently which happened to me a few times.

Jim

[JohnGrant]

I thing I ought to check the exact location of the dll. for the Steinway plugin. I understand that 64 bit dll.s work best when they are sitting in not just any old subdirectory, but in a dedicated 64 bit directory: programs/plugins as opposed to programs/plugins68.... or something like that. I haven't got the details with me now.

JG

[JohnGrant]

PROBLEM SOLVED:

Installing this time 8.5 Producer (not Studio, haven't tried that yet), I answered NO to the question whether I wanted to set up Fast Track Ultra (my interface) as "midi out".

I shouldn't have to do that, but I did. Now Garritan (and other piano synths) work fine as plugins, with absolutely no trouble at all.

If, on the other hand, in the install of Sonar I turn ON FTU's midi out, then I'm sunk. I should be able to turn off FTU's midi out, or at least override it in Sonar to run piano synths, etc., but once installed, FTU 's midi out appears to be "stuck" in the ON position.

Thus Sonar 8, it seems to me, has a problem: while the program clearly shows non-native piano synths like Garritan and Vintage (on Kontakt) as plugins in its synth rack, the plugins are not in fact recognized, even with all the proper midi and channel settings if "midi out" has been dialed in when the program is installed. The programmers screwed up, at least in respect to FTU midi settings. Maybe other midi interfaces work fine. Maybe it's just the demo program (although I doubt it).

JG

p.s. who is more than a little miffed about all the time wasted...

[JohnGrant]

Hmmmm.... I visited the Sonar website to download the demo for 8.5 Studio and it's not there! Only the producer demo is available at the moment...

Very strange .... because I wanted to confirm my hyphothesis about a glitch in the instalation of STudio. Now I can't! And I don't really need Producer, so I'd like to demo the smaller version (Studio) just to make absolutely sure it works for me.

It was shortly after I emailed Cake about the midi out/audio interface issue that the Studio demo disappeared.

Could there be a connection? (Or am I getting a swelled head?)

JG

[Haydn]

I'm a little confused by what your writing. You keep mentioning the you want to set your MIDI interface as the output. I think there may be a misunderstanding at this point.

MIDI for VSTi plugins will not go out to your MIDI device as the MIDI is internal in Sonar. The MIDI out of your tracks should be assigned to the plugin you want to trigger. The only thing the MIDI out should control is an external synth.

The path to play Konkakt, ARIA or any other VSTi plugin is to have you keyboard be your MIDI in for each track you record. The MIDI output for the track goes to your VSTi plugin. The plugin then outputs to an Audio track. The audio track should then be sent to a submix channel if using a submix or directly to the master output.

Jim